Stakeholder attitudes toward the incentives used to mitigate human-elephant conflict in southern Africa: A news media content analysis

African elephant populations are under substantial anthropogenic pressure, but these are not spatially homogenous. Elephant densities are high in parts of southern Africa, leading to conflict with human populations. Conservationists working to mitigate impacts of human-elephant conflict (HEC) will turn to mechanisms or incentives to achieve this, mostly financial (such as compensation, or income generation through tourism). Little is known about the attitudes of stakeholders' (such as farmers) toward financial incentives used to mitigate conflict. Here we carried out a content analysis of stakeholder evaluative expression, or valence, using reports from the southern African news media. We sourced 428 separate news articles over the past ten years, and quantitatively assessed stakeholder valence on the financial mechanisms used to mitigate human-elephant conflict. We found that stakeholder attitudes or valence differed across countries and that stakeholders were generally positive, even with regard to controversial mechanisms such as trophy hunting. Our work has some implication for conservation policy.